Lamont turns the heat up on Salmond

The SNP's own divisons on energy costs gave the Labour leader an obvious line
of attack

If you closed your eyes and listened to what they were saying – not their accents, needless to say – you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Alex Salmond and David Cameron on energy policy.

That, at least, was the proposition put up by Johann Lamont, the Scottish Labour leader, at Holyrood yesterday.

She said that, in rejecting Labour's plan for a freeze on energy charges, both First and Prime Ministers were singing from the same hymn sheet; on the face of it a pretty outlandish charge.

But Ms Lamont claimed that both men believed that the price freeze, as announced by Ed Miliband, to be "unenforceable", that both had said that the energy giants would merely increase their charges before and after the freeze and that both were "standing up" for the Big Six power companies.

She seemed to be getting somewhere, too, when Mr Salmond reminded everyone that it was the last Labour government that had created the present market in gas and electricity – an almost exact repeat of what Mr Cameron had said in the Commons only 24 hours before.

However, while Mr Cameron is proposing a thoroughgoing review of energy policy, which is unlikely to have any immediate effect on household bills, Mr Salmond repeated that his party's plan to transfer the current energy efficiency tariffs onto general taxation would lop £70 off bills.

But let's be clear – it's not £70 off what you're paying now, but £70 off the increased bill that you'll be faced with in future. Mr Salmond enjoys talking about such matters, as having been an oil economist at both RBS and the Scottish Office he is, as a colleague in the cheap seats reminded us "an energy bore".

His trouble, though, is that his ministers aren't necessarily on the same wavelength as him or, for that matter, each other. Ms Lamont claimed that Fergus Ewing, the energy minister, thinks the Miliband freeze is "unworkable" while Angela Constance, the youth employment minister, supports it.

By the end of this passage of arms Mr Salmond had fallen back on his tried and trusted position of saying that everything would be all right if an independent Scotland controlled energy prices in a way that it's not allowed to at present.

But if he doesn't agree with Labour's freeze on energy prices anyway, what difference would having the power to freeze them make?

Meanwhile, this column's old sparring partner, Lord Steel of Aikwood, put his memory banks into "selective" gearat Strathclyde University by attempting a few home truths and offering some constructive criticism of the Scottish Parliament.

Unfortunately, and as is often the way with old politicians, he singularly failed to own up to his own part in creating the present screw-ups. Lord Steel, who preferred to be called "Sir David" when he was Holyrood's presiding officer – he has no end of titles, this lad – deplored what he called the "belligerence and stridency" of First Minister's Question Time.

This wasn't supposed to happen, he said, pointing out that in the Scottish chamber the opposing parties sit in a semi circle, rather than two swords lengths away as they do in the Commons.

And he tried to convince us that, under what he called the "benign leadership" of Donald Dewar, the first First Minister, all was sweetness and light.

He also pointed out that the SNP now had an overall majority in Holyrood "which was never the intention of the original legislation on proportional representation".

Maybe not, but did Lord Steel never consider the possibility that the law of unintended consequences might well be visited upon him? After all it's not exactly an unknown occurrence.

The fact that he may not have wanted Scottish political leaders to bawl and shout at each other like they do at Westminster, or that one party would command an overall majority, does not mean that they'd never happen.

He may have been a co-chairman of the parliament's steering committee and a former leader of his party but that didn't make him omnipotent.

And I for one was not at all unhappy to see the back of the "benign" Dewar or to see the noble lord's best laid schemes on PR come apart with the Nats' victory in 2011.